Book status (maybe this should be a weekly thing?)

I think... I think... that Chapter 23 is in a form which I can be content with. I refuse to say "comfortable with".  There is nothing comforting about this chapter.  This has been difficult to write because it is becoming very painful to write about some things.  Indeed, at the moment I'm trying to take steps to help more accurately convey what was happening at that point in my life. Chapter 23 has been rough, to put it mildly. The...

Read More

Official Doctor Who LEGO sets are coming!

We will soon have a TARDIS officially rendered in LEGO... That pic is just the proof of concept from two guys who submitted their design through the LEGO Ideas page and have had it approved.  The actual sets will probably look somewhat different.  But even so... we're getting BBC-approved Doctor Who LEGO sets y'all!! Nerd Approved has a lot more about this...

Read More

Look at what I just found!

It's The Weird Spinning Head of Chris Knight! That's from 1998.  It was on my personal websites for a long time. "Weird" Ed helped me make it: he snapped the photos with a film camera while I sat in his office chair and rotated around to get the various angles. Then after getting the pics developed I scanned 'em and then put them together with GIF Construction Set. sigh... ...

Read More

500 words into Chapter 23

I am writing about the night that I stormed out the door of our apartment without telling my wife where I was going, because not even I knew where I was going. And how I wound up in Raleigh at my best friend's door at 10 at night. God only knows how I made it to the highway without crashing the car at the high speed I was going at. This is the part of bipolar disorder that I hate the most. Asking God why He let me have something like...

Read More

Son of ex-slave and Union soldier passes away (you read that right)

It's stuff like this that never ceases to fascinate me.  These things impress upon us that so much of our history... isn't that long ago after all. Luke Martin, Jr. passed away a few days ago in Raleigh (that's the capital of North Carolina for those who might not know that).  Mr. Martin was 97. He died 179 years after his father was born.  His father, by the way, was a former slave who escaped to freedom and then fought in the Civil...

Read More

Newly-discovered planet has rings TWO HUNDRED TIMES BIGGER than those of Saturn

I won't apologize for the all-caps there.  I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here... Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b.  Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view.  Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff...

Read More

I finally beat Zaxxon!

You might have heard about the Internet Arcade that Internet Archive fired up a few months ago.  All of those arcade games that we (or at least some of us) used to feed quarters into?  Well, almost 700 of them - as in the originals, not home console ports - are available to play for free in your web browser!  Which is a great thing because these games are a...

Read More

Book update for mid-January

I think I'm getting back into the full swing of writing my book, at last. I've completely re-written Chapter 1.  And I seriously hope that I'm not just seeing things but the more I read over it and how it flows into the rest of the manuscript, the better and better it's looking.  It sets up a much better tone for the book that follows.  It's more gripping.  It's more "me" than the original version was.  And that is what...

Read More

Reidsville's $30,000 monument to madness

So my hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina has decided to ultimately remove a nationally-recognized statue with more than a hundred years of history, and let it instead be replaced with a horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft... "We'll tear your soul apart!" Brief recap: almost four years ago the Confederate monument in downtown Reidsville was toppled and smashed...

Read More

Watch it now: the legendary CNN "end of the world" video

One of the things I've always wanted to do with this blog is post interesting stuff.  Or at least those things that are intriguing to me.  Admittedly, that has slacked off a lot in the past several months.  Between writing my book (a project that devoured most of 2014) and then Dad's passing a month and a half ago, this hasn't  been the best of times to...

Read More

A joyful Christmas despite myself

Here I am, the day after Christmas 2014.  And I'm only writing this because a lot of people were praying for me yesterday, that I might get through this holiday. Grief is hard enough already.  It's especially heartbreaking when it comes so close to the holiday season and you see that empty chair at the table.  It's not something that I haven't experienced already.  Mom passed away three days after Christmas three years ago, and...

Read More

It's a very Dalek Christmas!

Okay, that's it.  I give up.  I didn't know how having a Christmas this year was going to be at all possible.  In light of everything that's happened in the past nearly two months, yuletide joy was something that seemed way past feasibility.  Although, I haven't begrudged anyone from having that.  Just feels like I'm on the outside looking in this...

Read More

Currently going through a bout of depression...

Actually, it's a rapid-cycling episode that's been going on for the past two days.  I woke up yesterday morning, remembered that Dad was gone, went into sadness that suddenly plummeted into clinical depression (something that lacks any emotion whatsoever) and then got catapulted into a bout of mania where the sadness returned, got escalated beyond my ready grasp of things,...

Read More

Classic SESAME STREET: Bert and Ernie's "The Gift of the Magi"

Good googeley moogely... it's been ages since I posted any Sesame Street clips!!  I think maybe at least two years, maybe longer than that.  How in the world did I overlook such timeless material?  Shame on me! Time to make up for it.  And boy howdy, do I get to make up for it... I was waaaay young when this aired but I vividly remember it.  It was part of a Sesame Street Christmas special from... I think it was 1980? ...

Read More

The book: Moving ahead...

It was three weeks ago today that Dad passed away.  I'm still in a great state of grief, more than that even, about it.  There's a real shock that comes with seeing someone so close to you suddenly leaving you like that.  But I still believe that there was something of God's hand in how things played out.  If the circumstances had been slightly different in any of a thousand different ways, my family would not have had those sixteen...

Read More

You voted Republican last month? Why?

I'm going to say something right now, and I don't care if it offends ANY body.  If it happens to offend you, good: maybe you NEED offending to open your eyes... There is NO difference at all between the Democrat and Republican parties and anyone who puts the SLIGHTEST amount of trust in one party or the other... and I'm going to single out those who support the Republican party especially... are worse than fools and idiots. For the past...

Read More

Memorial video for Dad

On the night after Dad's passing, Anita (my sister), my aunt and uncle and I went through a ton of old photographs to use in the video that the funeral home would put together for the tribute that would play during visitation on the following night. Wilkerson Funeral did a very solid job in doing so and I wanted to share it on my blog. I don't want to say which one, but there is one photo in here that seriously broke my heart to include. It...

Read More